Landau on Redundancy

Today's quote is from Martin Landau's classic 1969 essay "Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap."

"In complex and tightly ordered systems, the cost of error can run very high...

 “Is it possible to take a set of individually unreliable units and form them into a system “with any arbitrarily high reliability”? Can we, in other words, build an organization that is more reliable than any of its parts?

“The answer, mirabile dictu, is yes. In what is now a truly classical paper, Von Neumann demonstrated that it could be done by adding sufficient redundancy.”

Landau was way ahead of his time on applying complexity theories to organizations.